Weird issue with PC!

[Doomsday]

Hey guys! I am having a weird issue with me PC. Can't figure out what it is.

The thing is my GPU used to hang up and freeze the system when under load like gaming or stress test. This happened before so I opened it up, cleaned it, applied a fresh thermal paste . reattached the heat sink and boom, it started working! But after a year now it is doing the same again but, i have another issue!

After a fresh windows 7 pro install, when I install the AMD drivers, my windows doesn't load. The windows loading screen shows up but the windows doesn't start. BUT, when I revert back to the last working state when the AMD GPU drivers were not installed, windows works.

I am not sure what the problem is as i have installed the latest and old drivers multiple times and had the same issue.
I have yet to bring another GPU and see whether it works or not but what if its the motherboard?

 

[Tharic-Nar]

Sorry for the slow reply. I doubt it's the motherboard, since a software change for a different piece of hardware is causing the issue. There is a chance that the GPU could in fact be dead, and it just coincided with the Windows reinstall - one of my systems basically did a similar thing not long ago, but with Win10 instead.

Now, it could be something else and Windows was not installed correctly, either because of a bad HDD, corruption from the install media, or memory. If you are overclocked, you might have hit a snag there and the age of the system is causing issue.

You could run a stress test without the GPU, with something like Prime95 and check temps with HWinfo, and if you get issues, it could be OC related rather than the GPU. In which case, I'd disable the OC, then test the GPU. If it turns out to be a bad OC, I'd look into reinstalling Windows again without the OC enabled to make sure there was no minor corruption taking place, then start to OC again afterwards but at a lower rate.

 

[Doomsday]

No problemo man! That's the problem, I cant stress test the gpu without installing the gpu drivers. Whenever i do install the drivers, windows wont load. the loading screen shows up but the windows does not load.
In order for me to run windows I have to uninstall the gpu drivers while going in to safe mode. There is no way for me to run windows with the GPU drivers installed...
Hmmm, i installed windows in me 80gb ssd rather than the 120gb ssd, could that be an issue? it shouldn't be me thinks...

You could run a stress test without the GPU

how do i do that?

 

[Tharic-Nar]

how do i do that?

I said just after, use something like Prime95 and check temps with HWinfo. Prime95 will pop up with an error if it detects an issue, just launch it as a stress test. Run small FFT to test the CPU, leave it running for 30 minutes or so, if you get no error, try the blend test. If blend errors, likely bad RAM.

I guess you are wondering what this has to do with the GPU? It's just checking to see if a system instability is causing the drivers to install bad. If the system is overclocked and unstable when you installed Windows, then you can get all kinds of issues. Could check the Windows install by going in CMD as admin and run sfc /scannow although I'm not sure it'll find much. Generally though, it's a bad idea to install the OS while the system is overclocked, even if it was stable before.

If you replaced the thermal paste on the GPU, it might have gone bad, but normally it would work with the drivers and only crash when under load. If you have spare thermal paste, could replace it. If you used liquid metal, that has a habit of evaporating after a year. If it's just normal paste, then be sure to apply liberally, better to use too much than too little. Have you tried the drivers direct from the GPU manufacturer, even if they're like 4 years old - your signature says you have a 6970, is that the correct card? Sometimes you need to install the driver from the company first, then update with the direct AMD driver after... because manufacturers are silly like that. Had to do that with an old Sapphire card before it would work.

One other thing to test of course is just reset the EFI/BIOS to defaults (save your current profile first if you can), then try the driver.

An 80GB SSD shouldn't be an issue if you have free disk space, at least 10-20GB spare should be enough, unless Windows 10 is trying to install itself.

 

[Doomsday]

Aah cool cool. Will try that...

Yes its the good old R6970, still running, lol! Time to replace as it has been 5 years almost, haha!
The thermal paste I used was Arctic Silver 5.